Jellico Hospital med forms to go digital

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September 20, 2010

Change to improve accuracy, speed

Anonymous The Times-Tribune The Times-Tribune Mon Sep 20, 2010, 01:47 PM EDT

CORBIN — By Carl Keith Greene/Staff Writer

Ever wonder why physicians’ handwriting on prescription forms is difficult to make out sometimes?

Not only patients, but nurses, medical technologists and other hospital staff have to put up with the handwriting, which can cause medical errors and slow patient care.

Jellico Community Hospital will begin using a Computerized Provider Order Entry system (CPOE) Tuesday that will help do away with those errors, said Jason D. Dunkel, executive director marketing.

After installation and training, in mid-February CPOE will be up and running, said Dunkel, in an interview Friday.

He explained that CPOE will “drastically reduce medical errors and speed up patient care.”

It isn’t the first electronic move toward patient care. The hospital already has an electronic medical records system, Dunkel said.

With the CPOE system in place, the hospital “will be at the forefront of new medical technology designed to improve patient safety, and will rank in the top 16 percent of the nation’s hospitals for having a fully-integrated electronic medical records system,” he added.

David Butler, the hospital’s chief executive officer, called the decision to install CPOE “an example of Jellico Community Hospital’s commitment to delivering the best possible patient care.”

According to Business Wire, 770,000 Americans die or are harmed from problematic drug events. More than half of the errors in medications happen during the ordering process.

Many of those problems are caused by illegibly written and incomplete orders.

Once the CPOE is installed Jellico hospital will see physicians directly filing their orders by computers into the electronic medical record.

Not only will it eliminate paper, but it will reduce errors and shorten the time between the physician’s order entered until the patient is affected.

Adventist Health System’s (AHS) vice president and chief medical information officer, Philip Smith, MD, has reported that full-scale CPOE systems implemented at other AHS hospitals have caused greatly reduced adverse drug effects, changes in physician behavior to improve patient care and a significant reduction in the number of times doctors had to be called to clarify prescriptions for pharmacists.

Smith concluded, “CPOE is safer – there’s less chance of misinterpretation of handwritten orders. It’s more efficient because there are fewer steps, and fewer steps means reduction of errors.” With care providers placing the orders into the computer, “we are not relying on someone else’s interpretation of what the plan is. It’s removing the middle man between the provider and the patient’s treatment.”

According to Jellico hospital’s Betty Fox the hospital was established in 1964 and became an AHS facility in 1974.

Dunkel added that the CPOE system is expected to be installed soon at Manchester Memorial Hospital, also an AHS facility.

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